Welcome to Most Innovative Companies. I'm Max Uffberg, and I'll be your host this week, standing in for Yaz while she's away on vacation. And I'm joined by our executive producer, Josh Christensen. Hey, Josh. Hey, Max. Thanks for filling in for Yaz this week. Another second time in the last month and a half, so thanks for coming on. Yeah, I don't know what her deal is, but...
For a wedding. She's in Italy for a wedding. Okay. I would love to go to Italy, but... I know, right? It's better than the reason why she was out last time when you co-hosted, which was food poisoning, which I guess may be like the Italy of stomach infections. I don't know if that makes any sense at all.
I don't think that tracks at all. Anyway, I've got a question for you, actually, before we get into today's conversation. We're going to be talking about AI a little later. You'll promo that in a second. But I feel like we're living in a bit of a sci-fi film. So I wanted to ask, what is your favorite sci-fi film? Oof.
Doesn't have to be AI related. I might go with Total Recall. Okay, I've actually never seen Total Recall. Is pertinent to what we're going to be talking about today? Should I be scared? Not at all, but it's a great Schwarzenegger movie. Okay, well, I feel like Terminator would have been the chalk term, like...
sci-fi Schwarzenegger film to go with? Controversial take would be that Total Recall is a thinking man's Terminator. Wow. Okay. We're hearing chiming in from Mark, who's our student guest, who will soon have a bit to say about that. But before we get to Mark, I'm actually going to take us through a bit of housekeeping, and then we can get into more of our conversation on AI, because we're raring to go. But
But I just wanted to quickly remind people that Fast Company's Innovation Festival is just two weeks away. It's so close. I can't believe it's already here again. I feel like every year it's an amazing event.
in New York City. It's September 18th through the 21st. Downtown, it can be. There's so many great panels, so many amazing voices and people from across industries, from entertainment to tech to some of the leading voices on innovation and the climate space. Max, are you coming up from Austin for Innovation Festival this year? I will be there for a few days, yes, as will, I think, all of the
tech team, including our guest who I'll introduce soon. Yeah, most of our tech team is pretty dispersed. We have a number of people across the country, but they'll all be in New York. So come get your tickets for Fast Company Innovation Festival. Drop into our DMs or send us an email at podcast at fastcompany.com. We'd love to meet up with our listeners of our show. Find me on threads. Just kidding. I don't have threads. Do you not have threads? You didn't sign up? No.
And I think that ship has sailed anyway. I don't think... I signed up for it...
I don't think anyone really uses threads. I think it's kind of done. Yeah, I stopped using X too. I just do Instagram now and TikTok. And that's about it. So find me on those two apps. I also have one other quick housekeeping. So listeners to MIC, you might have realized that there was a unexpected drop in your feed this past Friday. And if you listen to that, you heard a little bit about this upfront from me.
But to tell you a little bit more about that and what to expect, we're running a special miniseries in this feed from our friends at Fastco Works in Deloitte called Lead Through Disruption. It's a six-episode miniseries where you'll hear from voices like Andy Dunn and Fast Company and Inc.'s parent company, Mansueto Ventures' own CEO, Stephanie Mehta. She will be featured in that feed, so check that out. It's a really great series, and it'll be running every Friday through mid-October.
And of course, stay tuned for us every Wednesday. So that's all I've got, Max. Cool. Well, later on in today's episode, we will hear Yaz's conversation with Eleven Madison Park chef and owner, Daniel Hume, about why it's so difficult running a fine dining restaurant.
Eleven Madison is also celebrating 25 years in the global fine dining industry with a new book called Eat More Plants. But first, OpenAI is reportedly closing in on $1 billion in annual sales. And more broadly, AI is everywhere and on everyone's minds. So we're going to take a look at what's going on in the AI world. And here to help me break it down is Fast Company senior writer, Mark Sullivan. Hey, Mark. Howdy. Good to be here.
Before we get into everything, I need your take on Total Recall, because I need to know whether I need to watch this tonight or not. I definitely vote yes on that. In fact, I...
paid to watch that movie just a few weeks ago. It's one of the billion movies based on a Philip K. Dick novel, and it's about memory implantation. And I think it was made in the 80s, maybe, Max? 80s or 90s. Yeah, maybe early 90s, or yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's got a kind of a dated feel to it, which I think is very cool. But don't see the remake. Come on.
Colin Farrell starred in a remake that was awful. Oh, no. Yuck. Well, sold on the original. Yeah. Anyways, back to AI. Let's start off by talking a bit about ChatGPT Enterprise and Google's Duet AI tool, both of which are geared toward AI.
integrating AI into business practices. So Mark, why the sudden push to further integrate AI tech into business-facing apps and software? I think there's, you can look at this through sort of the greed and fear lens. If you're talking about this on the business side, I think you have...
A lot of business owners, businesses large and small, including everybody in the Fortune 500, that are looking at this new technology and trying to figure out what it is and wondering if it can be a shortcut, a money saver. To be blunt, they're probably looking at it to understand whether jobs can be eliminated, which will happen at some point in the future. And
And they fear that their competitors are going to get it before them and use it in ways that's going to hurt them and get yelled at by the board. And what about your own use of AI tools and AI tech? What's been most useful in terms of productivity or output?
My uses of it are really pretty basic. I like Anthropics Claude chatbot, which is, I think, the one that I've found has the best handle on the language and is best at preventing hallucinations, which is just fictionalizing or making things up or improvising. It'll do that when you want it to do it, but you're...
Anthropic's big thing is that they make steerable AI. So, you know, you can kind of work with it and point it toward the kind of things that you want it to generate. Quick plug here. Mark has a profile of one of the Anthropic founders out this week. Is that right? Yeah, Daniela Amidat. She founded the company with her brother, both of which were open AI people. So it's interesting that they left Amidat.
Open AI, which is the leader in the space and went out and did their own thing. And a lot of fun watching this sort of arms race heat up between these companies. Open AI might be a household name by now, but a lot of these other ones like Anthropic and others are probably not. We're going to be hearing a lot about them in the future. Yeah, let's talk for a second about this AI arms race. As you say, everyone knows Open AI. People obviously know Google and Google's barred.
Who are the other major players or dark horse candidates in this ongoing race? There's a number of them. I would say that the one that comes to mind first is Inflection AI, which is...
Started by a guy named Mustafa Suleiman that was in DeepMind from the very beginning and then went to Google after they were acquired by Google. But the thing about this arms race is like the people with the biggest weapons are going to win. And in this context, that means just raw server power.
You hear about a company called NVIDIA. They're the company that makes the chips that run all this stuff. And these AI models take a lot of computing power to run. And I don't think people understand just like how much compute power that inflection has. And you mentioned NVIDIA, a company that has seen its stock go absolutely bonkers in the last few weeks. What are the implications of its...
seismic growth? Well, it doesn't seem like a very healthy market dynamic that one company is providing 95% of the chips that are training these big AI models. Just looking at it
As a whole, if you're an investor in NVIDIA, that's a great dynamic. But it has created this world of haves and have-nots, like these big, well-moneyed companies like Facebook and Google. They have thousands of these chips and servers. And the person that's trying to develop models in their garage is just totally priced out of doing things that are relevant. Let's zoom out a bit.
It's been around 10 months since OpenAI debuted ChatGPT to the public. We've talked a little bit about some of the developments, including NVIDIA and some of the offshoots of OpenAI, but what's been the most surprising thing to you in these last 10 months? If you look at the data, the usership of ChatGPT has gone down a little bit. It's possible it'll pick back up now that the school year has started, but I guess I'm
surprised at how much it's captured people's imagination. Things don't often come along that bring so much interest and energy to the tech sector, but a lot of people continue to use it and
It's just been a big bang. We're still feeling just the first sort of shockwaves. Last November has just been really interesting to watch and really surprising, especially with the idea in mind that this technology already really existed at Google for a couple of years before OpenAI or ChatGPT ever showed up. And Meta, right? They built out their AI division back in...
2013 when they hired Jan LeCun. I think that was like 10 years ago. Yeah, that's right. Why was chat GPT, as we say, like AI is not anything new. I mean, the AI developments have existed for
decades, centuries, really, going back to Ada Lovelace, if you want to go back that far. Why is chat GPT such a significant moment, even if this technology kind of existed in some form or another for a number of years? It feels like this is, at least in my lifetime, the biggest mainstream technology
AI practical development? Do I have blind spots that I'm missing? Or what made this the moment? I think it's all about language. I think we're very sensitive and conscious of language. And if you think about this new stuff, they're like chat GPT sits on top of a new kind of AI model, which
maps the whole language and the meanings of the words and how they fit together in different contexts. And what you get is, you know, this neural network or this AI tool that
has this weirdly good understanding of the nuances of our language. One theory is that the reason this stuff got so much attention has really hit a nerve is because language is very core to who we are and how we behave every day. I will admit, I've tried using these AI tools once.
The chat GPTs, it still feels a little bit to me like the novelty of Siri when it first came out, where you remember there was all those prompts where you could get Siri to tell you different things like,
or tell a joke or something like that. It feels more novel than practical to me at this point. I think that's true right now. Like I think if ChatGPT, the public version, just stayed stagnant and that's what we had two years from now, that's basically a really good Ask Jeeves. It has more uses than that. As Mark said, though, it's the most conversational AI we've seen to date. And it's also, as we know, like it is really the first step. And it's
And it's going to get a lot more sophisticated and a lot more capable very quickly. It's already gotten a lot better. Just the public hasn't seen all of that. Imagine a chatbot that wasn't just trained on the open internet as ChatGPT is, but a chatbot that...
trains on you, trains on the conversations that you have with it. That's stuff that you could do that right now. I think what you're seeing is like this really powerful technology and a lot of companies are not going the full distance with it because they're very worried about the downside risks and containing the technology. They're really worried that this thing is going to
spit out some terrible advice to somebody and get somebody hurt or it slanders somebody or releases private information. There's a ton of work going on right now just figuring out how to deliver the benefits of this stuff while containing the serious risks in it. It seems likely that
there's going to be a dominant player that is creating and programming and monitoring the kind of ethical development of that. And I think that's the scary part for a lot of people.
It's always thinking about, okay, well, AI is not created in a vacuum. It's created by people. It's programmed by people and then set out into the world. What are the possible effects of the kind of implicit biases built into that? To your point, lest we forget, OpenAI is not some garage startup story. It has a $10 billion portfolio.
investment from Microsoft. Just a measly $10 billion. Yeah. A cool $10 bill. I've never said bill. I'm sorry. No, it's fine. It's a great time to start doing it. I feel like I'm financier. Patagonia vest just grows out of your chest right now. I will say though, a vest for the wintertime in Austin feels pretty nice. It feels like we're still a ways from any
meaningful AI regulation, even with the White House's upcoming AI summit, which is taking place later this month. Mark, is that a fair assessment? Do you think
we're actually on the cusp of some kind of regulatory overhaul? Or do you imagine Congress is going to miss the boat here? Yeah, I hate to go negative on it. I've actually been surprised and impressed about the alarm bells that this has set off in D.C. based on the conversations I've had with people like Mark Warner and others, probably on both sides of the aisle. And I think there's really been a large push to
climb the learning curve on it. The thing that is worrisome is just politically, it just seems like there's so many opportunities
for people to read political things into this type of legislation that shouldn't be read in. The Klausky example is on the conservative side or the Republican side. Any piece of tech legislation for a while there was just an attempt to silence or suppress conservative voices on social media. And it's that type of thing that I think could really sink meaningful discussions together.
on this and make it much, much harder to get something to the floor for a vote. Yet you remain sort of optimistic.
On the interest and awareness side, pretty optimistic and kind of impressed. On the political side, I'm like everybody. I've grown jaded and a bit pessimistic about how quickly things can get done. I would say the pessimism is pretty well warranted. How many years and hearings have we heard on social media? And there's been no meaningful legislation to the same political detriments that you just noted, Mark. I don't think there's been a major piece of
internet regulation or technology regulation since the 90s, since the CDA. Nothing really of note that's that level. So yeah, I think I would definitely be more pessimistic, but you're more read in on this than I am, certainly, with the actual lawmakers. Yeah, I think you're kind of spot on there. In fact, one of the things that I heard a lot of people say is that we
missed the boat on social media. We failed to protect children from social media companies like Facebook, now Meta. And we don't want to repeat that performance again because that really hurt. But at the same time, they've still not passed any meaningful privacy legislation, which people have been pushing for years. And now we have this big wave coming at us with AI and we're expecting them to do something meaningful there. And in that context, it doesn't seem that hopeful.
It does feel like a slightly different equation, though, because on the one, so for one, the stakes are arguably just so much higher with AI. With social media, we were talking about serious detrimental side effects, but the
With AI, we're talking about world-shattering changes. I think I disagree a little bit. I think social media was pretty world-shattering from a cultural standpoint. It's completely changed the way every single human interacts. It has, but with AI, there are smart people in the room saying this could take over the world. It's like bond-level stakes. True. True.
I guess relatively speaking, but I guess the degrees of which the world has shattered from technology. It's just how many little pieces is it broken into? True. I think that about wraps up our time here. Mark is the optimist. Josh is the pessimist.
I will side with Mark. And we're going to take a quick break, followed by Yaz's interview with Daniel Hume about his decision to go completely plant-based during the pandemic. And then we will circle back with Mark for our Keeping Tab segment. To start off with, you know, you've spoken about this a bunch and it's been a while now, but tell me about Eleven Madison, your restaurant, which is one of the best restaurants in the world.
deciding to go vegan? Well, let me give you just a little backstory. I was a professional cyclist before cooking and had an accident when I was 22 and then really decided to put all my energy behind this career. But I took this very much athlete's mentality seriously.
towards it. I wanted to win awards, I wanted to work with the best, I wanted to be the best. And I was sort of starting to climb this mountain. It was exciting with every award there was, you know, new excitement, there were moments to celebrate, it was a way to measure, it was a way to motivate the team, it was a way to motivate myself. And even though all of these awards, you
You can argue they're political or they don't mean anything or this one is more important than the other. They meant something to you, right? Exactly. They did mean something and they meant something to our team as well. And it gives you a direction. And it's very powerful to work towards these sort of targets. And then eventually we became the best restaurant in the world.
And in that moment, we reached sort of the mountaintop of that summit. And the truth is that in that moment, I felt really disoriented because now I didn't know where are we going next. Yeah. And it took time to figure this out. And then we had a beautiful renovation of the restaurant, which gave some direction. And then, of course, the pandemic hit.
And that was devastating for our industry. We lost a lot of our team. In the real estate, you heard people say it's location, location, location. Yeah. In the restaurant industry,
business, it's really people, people, people. It's all about the people. And so the pandemic was brutal because we lost a lot of our team. Before the pandemic, I'm a co-founder of an organization called Rethink Food. We take foods from restaurants, prepare meals for people in need.
And when the pandemic started, because of my involvement with Rethink, I was super tapped into what was happening around food insecurity. And we have 8 million people living in New York. In normal times, there's about a million that's food insecure. That number doubled within the first two weeks of the pandemic. So we're speaking 25% of New York City food insecure. And here I was,
an empty kitchen, a team without jobs, farmers sitting on ingredients that are going bad, and the growth of food insecurity. So I decided that we would turn Eleven Madison Park into a community kitchen. And we started cooking these meals. We cooked about 8,000 meals a day. And not only did we cook the meal, I also wanted to
really understand where these meals are going. And we went out into the different neighborhoods and starting to really understand what's going on. And I felt guilty during that time. And I felt like, wow, I should have done much more before. It was the first time I really actually felt like connected with New York City. I started to feel like a New Yorker because I was in neighborhoods I've never been before. There are amazing people out there
in different neighborhoods and people who have very little and give everything. And that was really so inspiring. And we wanted to really go and support these individuals rather than bringing our own sort of ideas into these neighborhoods, which we don't know very much. You know, before the pandemic, I was sort of on the mountaintop with awards and accolades. I felt disoriented and also dissatisfied.
And here we are in the pandemic. Our restaurant is closed. On one hand, we're facing bankruptcy on the business side, but we're doing this work. And I get up in the morning feeling extremely happy and satisfied and connected with New York City, connected with my craft.
realizing how powerful food is. I knew that we were making a difference in people's lives during that time. Were you paying your staff through the pandemic? We paid some of it, not all of them, but some of them. And the way the restaurant business works is we have guests on any given night and we pay for our ingredients in 30 days. So that's why people were so surprised by the restaurant industry change.
was on its knees so quickly. But that's how the whole restaurant business is set up. So all the payments came due. Exactly. And there's no more income. So it was really challenging and going through the process, even facing bankruptcy. Luckily, we didn't have to go there, but we definitely went through this process of what this even means. And we had bankruptcy lawyers who walked us through and
That process was so painful and so scary, and I don't wish it to anyone. But in truth is that after the fact, it was one of the greatest gifts because what it does, you sort of have to come to terms with being okay
with this if this happens. Right. Okay, I'm not attached to any of the material things. At the moment when you were facing bankruptcy, were you ever like, I don't think I want to own a restaurant again? I definitely thought that the second mountain to climb has to do with giving back.
and using the voice that I have gained because of all the awards to make sure I use that voice for change. I felt like I had a responsibility. And I didn't know what that meant, but it crossed my mind. That probably doesn't mean having a three-mesh last-door restaurant. And I was okay with that. Yeah. There was time for a new chapter.
At some point during the pandemic, our landlord came to us. They called me and they said, hey, Daniel, we see what you're doing. It's incredible. You just need to know that we're behind you and
We are going to forgive the rent and we're going to help you reopen the restaurant. Very few nice stories about New York City landlords. Yeah, no. This was a good one. You know, I've had a great relationship with them for years. And I mean, for everyone, I think everyone realized during the pandemic that
relationships are so important, right? Like having better relationships with your neighbors, with your suppliers, everyone. Once things open back up, tell me what that was like and tell me, you know, was that the moment you decided or? No. So when they called and said, OK, we're going to help you reopen in that moment, it was still more than a year away for the reopening. I put my creative hat back on.
And I was thinking about what would this mean and what is the restaurant going to be that we will reopen? I knew that I had changed. I knew that I didn't want to open the same restaurant as before. I also knew from a creative standpoint, the world didn't need another preparation on a butter poached lobster or on a honey lavender glazed duck.
But we are actually in a crisis and our food system is collapsing. And I think the people who have the power with a voice and with a skill in food, we really need to address this together. So I felt I wanted to open a restaurant that was speaking to this. And it was clear that it would be a fully plant-based restaurant.
restaurant. How did your staff react when you told them? It was really scary. It was so like my team, I think, was scared because we didn't know if guests would come. Can you have a luxury restaurant that only serves vegetables? I think there was fear about we have practiced
perfecting cooking meat or fish and now we're cooking vegetables so you leave all that knowledge behind right not everyone wants to do that it's like you're learning French you're perfecting it you're thinking you're moving to France and then like five days before they tell you actually we're moving to Spain it's like no I want to go to France I've just learned French well
What was interesting, and I think it was true for many of us, but during the pandemic, we had a lot more time on our own. So I was going through the process of like, are we going to go bankrupt? Can we reopen? What's the situation? Coming to terms with losing everything, I feel like I came from a place of making this decision, I have nothing to lose. And so from that place, it wasn't that scary.
But then when we brought the team on board and we got closer to the reopening and I started to understand the pressure of, yeah, we do need guests. We do need to pay our team. This isn't just an artistic endeavor, but this is our livelihood. Of course, it got really scary for me as well.
You know, something that made waves in the food world relatively recently was Noma's decision to basically close their dining operations at the end of, is it 2024? What that illustrated in part, or what the news that came from that and how it was reported was that it's the economics of running a fine dining restaurant are so difficult. And I'd love to hear you kind of talk about that a little bit. Where does that difficulty come from? All of it. Yeah.
No, it's extremely challenging. It's very labor intensive. Ingredients are expensive. We're in beautiful locations that require a lot of upkeep and high rents. And we put our food onto expensive food.
porcelain. These restaurants are highly creative. So we constantly have new service pieces and new elements. And yeah, it's just very high standards. And if there is a little chip on a plate, then it's over. Then it's over. And when a plate goes out,
to a table but the guest is up to the bathroom, then that plate of food needs to be redone. You can tell I've never been to Eleven Madison Park because I was like, that's crazy. Yes. You launched Eleven Madison Park Home, which lets people basically get a meal kit. Sounds kind of reductive, but that's what, you know, a very fancy meal kit from EMP if you live in New York.
Tell me why you decided to launch that. Was it related to the economics of the restaurant business? Is it just something different? How do you think about that? You know, I think on this plant-based journey, we really want to make it as accessible as possible. So we, of course, have this fine dining restaurant with this fine dining experience, but of course not everyone can.
is able to come and come often. So we thought we would also love to sell some of our products that we use in our cooking that are crucial in our cooking. And we want to have a platform where we share recipes and products that are available. All right, we are back with Mark and it's time to wrap up the show with Keeping Tabs, where each of us shares a story, trend or company we're following right now.
So, Mark, as our guest, why don't you kick us off? Well, I suppose this is a bit overexposed, but I've been watching the antics of Vivek Ramaswamy and the GOP primary situation. Oh, no. He's a very annoying guy, but it's just been fun to watch how much he annoys the other candidates on the stage. And he's more of a traditional...
Republican, I think he's really got some
bad ideas, like totally deleting whole government agencies, like quite a few of them. And he supports handing over Ukraine to Russia immediately. But I've just been watching him and nobody really thinks he has a chance. It's been fun to watch him annoy everybody. I saw he had quite the flub last week when he claimed on CNN that he had been misquoted
by the Atlantic and then the Atlantic released the audio transcripts showing that indeed he'd been accurately quoted. He just seems...
to no one's surprise, like a bit of an amateur. But I imagine he's hoping to parlay this into a cabinet position should Donald Trump win the presidency and avoid prison. Yeah, some sort of like the profile raising is the scary thing. It's like he's not going to win that like this time around. It's inevitably going to be Trump again in the primary. But like it's just more elevating of these sort of like hack people.
I was reading about, I don't know if either of you have dug into like his company and how he made his money and like really like sketchy level, fraudulent, pharmaceutical. It's really messed up. And God, where do these people come from? It's just so depressing. Josh, how about you tell us about what you're keeping tabs on?
Yeah, so I'm keeping tab on Walgreens, whose CEO, Roz Brewer, just stepped down after two years, which is a very short time. It came in the middle of the pandemic in a really very weird time for Walgreens. And side note, Walgreens was actually my first job in high school.
And yes, I am a Nepo baby. My dad did get me that first job at Walgreens. My guests with this move from Roz, who came from Starbucks and Sam's Club and Walmart, a more retail background, and they're seeking a new CEO with deep healthcare experience, which seems to be
The new trend since they've acquired VillageMD, a lot of these pharmacy companies are moving more into the healthcare space, which is weird because back when I worked at Walgreens in 2006, there was this whole push from Walgreens to go more into the healthcare route following suit with CVS, who had just acquired MinuteCard.
clinic. So it's just rehashing this place where they tried to push again and then swung back. It's such a weird company, guys. I don't even know. I've learned so much about Walgreens just now. It's a wild company, honestly, in a lot of ways. If you're ranking the major pharmacies. Between Walgreens, CVS. I know Walgreens is at the top. Walgreens is number one.
Rite Aid's three? I mean, I guess CVS and Walgreens are the two big ones. But after that, Rite Aid's gone away. Brooks, if anyone remembers Brooks Pharmacy, that's gone away. Obviously, some of the smaller trains like Duane Reade in New York here has been acquired by Walgreens. My dogs are barking. They love Walgreens. They love Walgreens. Anyways, Max, what's your keeping tabs?
I am following in Yaz's footsteps and nominating something totally unrelated to Fast Company's coverage. And I was watching college football this past weekend.
All right. So I'm keeping tabs on the scores. Did you watch the Colorado TCU game at all? That was the big game from over the weekend, apparently. I did. It was pretty cool. And Deion Sanders' son is the quarterback. Yeah. And was incredible. Killed it. Also, shout out to my Temple Owls. Historically bad team, but they beat Akron. So 1-0. Wow. Okay. Wow. That's a real juggernaut battle. Yeah.
Temple versus Akron. There was a stretch there where Temple was pretty good like 10 years ago and just holding on to that glory. Well, maybe one day it'll come back again. More of a basketball school. More of a basketball school. But I live in Austin and UT is awesome. There you go. Quinn, yours. Yeah, he shaved the mullet, which is a bummer, but he's looking good. He looked good that first game and hopefully it cools down enough that I can go to a game. It's still like 100 degrees out here, so...
And that's it for Most Innovative Companies. Mark, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, I enjoyed it. Our show is produced by Avery Miles and Blake Odom. Mix and sound design by Nicholas Torres. And our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Remember again to subscribe, rate, and review. And we will see you next week.